Niche Marketing: Tightly Targeting Your Audience

I tend to drone on and on about the power of tightly targeting your niche market here on this blog, and for good reason - because it WORKS! However, a lot of people still aren’t “believers” in the cause.

Today is 08-08-08, the luckiest day of the year if you’re Chinese! Samuel Goldwyn is credited with the quote, “The harder I work, the luckier I get. ” Well, it’s my belief (based on years of practice AND observation) that when you tightly target your niche market, you increase your “luckiness” factor exponentially.

There’s an interesting story of the value of tightly targeting your audience over at TalkShoe. TalkShoe is an open application that allows people to use voice and text-chat to talk with interesting people with similar interests around the world.

In the post Online Audio Advertising Market Still Developing, Dave Nelsen writes:

TalkShoe has demonstrated that audio advertising can be very valuable when properly targeted to narrowly-segmented audiences. An example of this is my Cellar Dwellers Home Winemaking show. Brad Ring, the editor of WineMaker Magazine, emailed me after discovering the show on iTunes. He wrote something to the effect of “Dave, every one of your listeners is a perfect candidate subscriber for my magazine; let’s do a deal.” And even though I average just 500 to 800 unique episode-plays per week, we did. Anecdotally, it appears that a very high proportion of my listeners now subscribe to Brad’s magazine, although neither of us knows the exact numbers.

Now that I’ve seen it in action, the power of micro-segment targeted advertising is undeniable.

Ah, another believer enters the fold!

As a magazine editor, Brad Ring knows EXACTLY who his target audience is and when he discovered the podcast, knew he had a perfect vehicle for adding subscribers to his magazine. Meanwhile, had Dave created a show “Dave’s Many Diversified Interests”, a show which covered home wine making AND cheese making AND trapshooting AND agility training for dogs… the results would have been much, much different.

The point is, had Dave not tightly targeted his podcast, he wouldn’t have been “lucky” enough to be found by Brad. The reason Dave’s podcast caught Brad’s eye is that Brad’s eye is caught by ANYTHING to do with wine making. (Hint: Brad’s subscribers eyes are equally drawn to anything having anything to do with home wine making as well!)

What is your niche market? Who is your tightly targeted audience? When you know the answers to these questions, you can easily craft content which catches those people’s attention.

If you’re having trouble getting focused, pick up a copy of my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results. I’ll walk you through the process of identifying and targeting your niche market step by step.